Peer idealization, internal examples, and the meta-philosophy of genius in the epistemology of disagreement

Abstract

The epistemology of disagreement (EoD) has developed around a highly idealized notion of epistemic peers. The analysis of examples in the literature has not been very effective at mitigating this idealization, due to a tendency to focus on cases of extant philosophical disputes. This makes it difficult to spotlight the respects in which discussants are non-ideal, because the discussants are disciplinary colleagues. At the same time, widespread attitudes in academic philosophy about the importance of raw intelligence in doing philosophy can mislead us about the fragility and unpredictability of expertise. The use of such examples is not strong methodology.